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McLaren driver Lando Norris made it very clear he did not relish being the first pacesetter of Formula 1’s all-new era as its next-generation 2022 cars hit the track for their first-ever official timed running at Barcelona.
Norris recorded a 1m19.568s to lead the way on Wednesday, but his laptime had come on the softer C4 compound compared to the C3 tyres used by his nearest rival, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who was six tenths of a second adrift.
More pertinently though, it was widely understood that the laptimes through the opening day of testing were not representative of much at all.
Norris’s benchmark was more than two and a half seconds slower than the best time from the last opening pre-season day in Barcelona at 2020.
So when asked about being first on the timesheets, Norris reacted with a ‘oh, don’t say that’, making it clear across several answers that he put no stock whatsoever in the result.
Productive day, but annoyed I’m P1. Now you gonna think we fast and waaaaay over hype us. Omegalul pic.twitter.com/ipLHduHpgN
— Lando Norris (@LandoNorris) February 23, 2022
“I didn’t want to be P1, if anything I’d rather be last,” he said. “Because now the expectations are so high, and everyone thinks we’re incredible.
“I think we just had a slightly different run plan to the other people. We’ll see in the next few days, people will probably go much quicker than what I did.
“I’m happy, the car was running, we did over 100 laps in the end. I can be happy enough.
“But today is obviously not about the laptime. I don’t care if I’m first or last – I think if anything it’s worse if you’re in first because now everyone thinks we’re amazingly fast, which I don’t really reckon we are.”
In another answer, he quipped that “now everyone’s going to think we’re going to win the race, but no chance”.
The 103 laps logged by Norris were actually on the lower side of things with every team bar the struggling Haas and Alfa Romeo managing to eclipse that tally.
“I would’ve liked a few more laps,” Norris conceded. “We were planning to do a few more, we did have a few problems here and there.”
However, Norris still made it clear he was happy with both the day’s workload and with how the car felt, as he was “more confident than expected” right away driving the new McLaren MCL36.
“I was expecting worse in a way, I was expecting more things to adapt to and more things to get used to.
“But I think on the whole a lot of it was quite similar – and that was good, because it allowed me as a driver to get in and feel quite confident quite quickly.
“So I think we did a good job with that and the whole day itself we got through our programmes.
“Good start to the test, sets us up well for the next two days.”
Daniel Ricciardo will take over the McLaren for the entirety of Thursday’s running, and he and Norris are then due to share the mileage on Friday.
